The reasons why these people give out my email instead of one that they can access have always been a bit mysterious to me. It’s one thing to save yourself some spam by using a throwaway address. But why use someone else’s for correspondence you actually want to receive? The closest I’ve come to a working theory is that a lot of them, having been slow off the mark to obtain their own gmail, have addresses like [email protected] Either they believe they can leave off the numbers and receive the messages anyway, or they often simply forget. That or the E. Ratliffs of the world just view [email protected] as some kind of shared resource.